I was about to say, like, the coloring of the shirt made it look like she was wearing a bra, which made the messaging about going braless kind of seem… stupid?

Sorry, my brain is going so fast that my sensory motor cortex has to shift gears, otherwise I’ll burn out my clutch, Blow out my tires, wreck my transmission, crash into the wall, burst into flames, and take a family of four with me on the way out.

And the ease of hiring people who have experience with Microsoft clients compared with the ease of hiring people that can set up an open source version

I am IT staff and I’ve worked for government in the past.

No matter how easy you make the swap over, no matter how much money it offers to save, there’s gonna be somebody who has sign off level executive authority who will refuse to change anything, because it means changing something, and they won’t like it.

Making a company-wide transition from Microsoft to a free version that does exactly the same is not a simple change.

If you make the change, you’re going to see a huge upswing in the number of support calls. You’re going to see a huge upswing in the number of complaints. You’re going to see downturns in efficiency and productivity as people make the changes, not to mention the fact that administering libreoffice from an organizational standpoint is a completely different beast from administering office.

I’m not saying that it can’t be done, by any stretch of the imagination.

I’m saying that the human element is the largest factor in whether or not it would be done, and unless you are already the city administrator or a big to-do inside of the fish pond you find yourself in, you likely do not have the human capital needed to make the transition, regardless of every other benefit.

If you want to get this done, I would suggest preemptively installing libre office on every single computer in the entire organization and then slowly telling people to use it as the opportunity arises so that three to five years from now there will be enough people who have used it that the transition would not be a huge ordeal.

Short of that you need to have an executive mandate from on high come in and say, we are not using Microsoft Office anymore, we will use LibreOffice, here are your training hours, go.

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It also conveniently overlooks the massive issue of privacy in the first place.

It’s not a bad thing to live in a world where you can’t be blackmailed because everyone already knows everything about you.

It could be theoretically utopian to live in a world where privacy is not an issue.

The gigantic fucking pink dragon in the room is that the people who have the power over the information that is made public, want to use it to make money off of you in every single facet of your life.

If they could strip mine your grandmother for the calcium in her bones, and make a penny off of it, (that is, a penny more than her current remaining economic index of output into the economy) her ass would be tossed into the fucking meat grinder.

When there is some sort of ruling body that cares more about the happiness of every single person on the planet more than they care about making money or having power, and those are the only people that have access to your personal data, then yes.

But right now, people are people, and every person is evil to some degree, there’s no value for you or me in giving them unfettered access to every aspect of our existence.

We are not robots. We are not automatons. We are not rational. We are not reliable. We are not repeatable. We are not resources to be exploited. We are not cogs in machines. We are not grist for the mill.

We are human fucking beings with the exact same intrinsic value and worth to our very existence as every other living human being on this planet, regardless of every other possible situation that exists.

To protect our intrinsic value, we must have privacy and autonomy. And we cannot have autonomy without privacy, and we cannot have privacy without autonomy.

Those are good advices and I will take them into consideration. I know I’ll get over it eventually, But at the same time I also know that one, she’s higher in the corporate hierarchy than I am, and two, if you were a boss and you heard a man trying to complain about being unfairly judged over a passive allegation of sexist creepiness versus a highly ranked and respected woman who made the allegation. It’s in your best financial interests to believe the woman and dismiss the complaints of the man.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that 99 times out of 100, it’s actually the man being a creep. It sucks to be in that 1% category this one time.

This is fairly obvious, but I can offer an anecdote.

I am a man, for context. Recently I had to edit some personnel photos for my company.

Some group had been brought in to take headshots of all of the major players, a lot of whom are women, and they did a terrible job. Found out after the fact that the group that was brought in was brought in nepotistically and did not have any proven skill worthy the amount of money that the company paid them for their services.

Since it was my job to edit the photos, I was complaining about the quality of the photos, how the wrong lenses had been chosen that caused their faces to be distorted, how the makeup was done inexpertly, and how the photos were a significant downgrade of the photos that were currently there in most cases. I have a little bit of experience in this because my ex-girlfriend was a model and I attended and helped and actually photographed her on multiple occasions for clothing distributors and for makeup brands, like I know a little bit of what I’m talking about. Just a little bit.

A co-worker of mine got really upset that I was talking about the appearance of my female co-workers.

There was no opportunity for me to explain to her that I am not talking about my coworkers. I’m talking about the photographs of my coworkers. She directly ordered me to “not talk about the appearance of my female coworkers”.

And now it’s really hard for me to think positive thoughts about her because she immediately went to one of the worst possible explanations for what I was doing rather than asking or even talking to me about it.

I know well enough to know that if you’re talking about your co-workers and one of your co-workers comes in and says, don’t talk about your co-workers, to not talk about your co-workers. She’s clearly indicated that she is offended. Fine.

But I was talking to one of the co-workers who had their headshot, and we were discussing her headshot, and the quality of it, and what they had done right, and what they had done wrong, when that person came in and told me to shut up. She interjected herself into a conversation she was not a part of, and indicated that she was offended that this conversation was happening and implied that I was being sexist for having it.

Like, we were having a good and productive conversation because it had already been decided that another group was going to be brought in for additional headshots because the quality of these headshots was not up to snuff.

But now I’m all bent out of shape, and personally butthurt, and she feels like, you know, she struck a mighty blow for the feminist cause, and it’s all bullshit, and it just- I’m- I’m struggling to find a way to stop sitting in my feelings over it.

Before all of this, I really liked her as a person. Now I don’t want to be in the same room with her because she can judge me like that.

When “hundredths fractions of security” fails to get a laugh, I know I’m in the wrong group of people.

Surely you understand how a stupid response to a silly statement like it is one of the sayings of all time can be appropriate in humorous situations, right?

I understand that you did not find it funny, but I hope that you can understand that it was my intention to be funny, and therefore a serious response is disproportionate.

I didn’t say it’s secure, I just said it’s security.

You can’t say that a solution is no security at all when it requires time and intelligence to bypass.

It is at least 0.01 security.

If it runs “fast enough” on a completely clean system that would cost the average user $1500, then companies assume that that means that it is a good product.

If you want better software, you have to give developers worse hardware to develop on, and more time to develop.

I feel like for wooden windows all you would have to do is pull the trim and then you can remove the glass slider and sand it down so that it will slide correctly and then reassemble.

That definitely seems like something that could be done weekend warrior style with a couple of cheap tools and a few YouTube videos.

That reminds me, I also need to redo my fence.

I have 23 fence posts that will probably need to all be pulled and replaced, and then do all of the rafters and whatnot.

Yay

Let’s see, internally I have some trim to paint, and I need to install the motion sensor LED lighted stairway paths on the internal and external stairs and install the tops for the steps.

I might redo the motion sensor under cabinet lighting because the modules that are there are 4,000 Kelvin and I would prefer 3,300 Kelvin.

After that, I need to clean and organize, I have one countertop to replace, A few doors to shorten to account for the new flooring that I just installed.

Then it’ll be time to redo the bathrooms.

They’re just going to get a light update with a new bathtub, new countertop and sink, new vanity, and painted walls.

Once that’s done, I’ll probably hire somebody to paint the interior.

Oh yeah, and I need to dig trenches and install the external 12 volt lighting for the driveway.

Lots to do. I could easily spend the rest of the year just doing all of that, but once it’s done, the only thing left to do would be to like paint or replace internal doors so that they’ll match the new trim and possibly rework the railing on the stairs to make them a little safer, a little more up to date.

The other real tradeoff is that it doesn’t rely on rare earth materials in order to function. Sodium is incredibly abundant and can easily be filtered out of seawater for all the world’s needs for the next thousand years.

It’s also theoretically less toxic and less likely to explode, and even though for now it costs more than lithium, what with lithium having had 20-some odd years of development behind it, the price will come down because the raw materials to make it are abundant and cheap.

I wouldn’t necessarily trust that. I have used Xfinity for a long time and my IP address often went months without changing.

If I want to scream into the void, I can do that anywhere and anytime, and I do not need a web server to do it.

To quote Ariel, I want to be where the people are.

Just so that I get this out while it’s fresh on my mind, what’s wrong with the internet right now is cyberfeudalism.

The internet is essentially an infinite world, so no matter how much the large companies gobble up, we’ll always be able to go somewhere else.

That being said, it gets really fucking exhausting to move over and over again to different apps and different locations just so to talk to people without some greedy, megalithic corporation there, snooping on everything you say and ingesting your words to feed some abomination intelligence simulation or to figure out the best way to sell you a new pair of fucking socks.

All of that being said, I’m just saying it fucking sucks to continuously be a refugee, and what sucks about apps and companies and programs that end up selling out for a dollar is that if you don’t emmigrate to a new platform, you become nothing.